Ravinia 2024 Issue 6

daughters have been invited to the handsome Prince’s Spring Ball. Cinderella is left to clean the house in her sooty clothes and sleep near the kitchen fireplace. One night, a beggar woman arrives, and Cinderella invites her to rest near the fire. She reveals herself to be Cinderella’s fairy godmother and offers a pair of glass slip- pers, which transform the girl’s dirty clothes into a beautiful gown. Before Cinderella leaves for the Spring Ball, she is warned that the magic will only last until midnight. Her stunning beau- ty attracts the Prince, who dances with Cinder- ella until the chimes begin to toll 12 times. The frantic girl runs away as her ball gown returns to dirty rags, leaving one glass slipper behind. The Prince searches his kingdom for the beauti- ful girl whose foot fits the glass slipper. After the stepmother’s unsuccessful attempts to force the slipper onto her daughters’ feet, the second glass slipper falls from Cinderella’s pocket. The Prince instantly recognizes his beloved. The couple confess their love and marry. The ballet’s compositional process did not end with such easy happiness. News of German in- vasion reached Prokofiev’s dacha on June 22, 1941. All attention and effort focused on the re- sistance. Prokofiev set aside Cinderella to write an epic operatic setting of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace , based on a libretto by Mira Mendel- sohn—one of several important compositions from the war years. As with other artists and in- tellectuals, Sergei and Mira continued eastward to avoid the German invaders, moving through the Caucasus to Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Ka- zakhstan) and eventually to the city of Molotov (now Perm) in the Ural Mountains. The Kirov Ballet also resided temporarily in Molotov, giv- ing Prokofiev his long-delayed opportunity to finish the Cinderella score, work he accom- plished in late summer and early fall 1943. He completed the orchestration the following year. Unfortunately, the local opera and ballet house proved too small for such a lavish production. Cinderella eventually premiered at the Bolshoy Theater in Moscow on November 21, 1945, with choreography by Rostislav Zakharov, Yuri Faver conducting the orchestra, and Galina Ulanova in the title role. Mikhail Fikhtengolts (1920–1985) arranged five movements from Prokofiev’s Cinderella : Grand Waltz (Act II); Gavotte (Act I); Court Dance, or Passepieds (Act II); The Winter Fairy (Act I); Mikhail Fikhtengolts and Mazurka (Act II). The Grand Waltz follows Cinderella’s arrival at the Spring Ball, when she and the Prince dance and fall in love. Fikhten- golts was an award-winning Soviet violinist and protégé of Pyotr Stolyarsky, whose students also included David Oistrakh. At age 15, one year below the minimum age, Fikhtengolts received special permission from the Minister of Culture to participate in the 1935 national competition of young performers, which he won. Two years later, he took part in the inaugural Eugène Ysaÿe Competition in Brussels. Oistrakh received first prize, and Fikhtengolts came in sixth. Four of the six top prizewinners were students of Stol- yarsky. Fikhtengolts’s marriage to the daughter of a government official executed by the Stalin regime led to the cancelation of all his concert appearances. The resulting emotional distress produced debilitating pain in his hand, leaving Fikhtengolts unable to perform for 23 years. His attention turned to arranging and teaching at the Gnessin State Musical College in Moscow. The family pedagogical tradition continued with his daughter, Natalya Fikhtengolts, who later taught violin at the Gnessin Special Music School, a pre- paratory school for talented young musicians. DARIUS MILHAUD (1892–1974) Le boeuf sur le toit , op. 58 Darius Milhaud waited in Aix-en-Provence— the ancestral home of his Provençal Jewish fam- ily—to be summoned into military service as the Germans pushed toward Paris right before the First Battle of the Marne (September 5–12, 1914). That order never arrived. According to his autobiography, Notes sans musique (Notes with- out Music), he was “rejected for military service on medical grounds.” Milhaud returned to Paris three months later and discovered that almost all of his classmates at the Paris Conservatory had been deployed to the front. His receipt of the conservatory’s Lepaulle Prize for his Sonata for Two Violins and Piano must have struck him as a somewhat hollow victory. More devastating was the death of his childhood friend, the poet Léo Latil, in battle on September 27, 1915. Mil- haud could do little to support the war effort, though he eventually was sworn into the army in the photographic service, which opened doors to the diplomatic corps. Paul Claudel, a widely traveled French diplomat and poet, enlisted Mil- haud as his personal secretary during his term as ministre plénipotentiaire in Rio de Janeiro; Clau- del’s primary responsibility was to ensure the ongoing supply of food from Brazil to France. The two French travelers arrived in Rio de Janei- ro on February 1, 1917—right in the middle of Carnival. Milhaud instantly fell under the spell of the city’s “potent charm,” especially the capti- vating rhythms and melodies of the Carnival songs. He began collecting printed music of maxixes (the Brazilian tango) and Argentine tangos, learning to play their syncopations with authentic swing on the piano. With the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, Claudel and Milhaud began the journey back to France through Puerto Rico and New York City. This was a bittersweet departure for Milhaud: “I was very happy at the thought of going back to Paris and of seeing my parents and friends again, but my joy was tinged with a certain nostalgic re- gret: I had fallen deeply in love with Brazil.” Milhaud returned to a revitalized Paris with a mind filled with pleasant memories and a trunk full of Brazilian music. He immediately fell in with a group of daring composers, known as Les Nouveaux Jeunes, under the paternalistic guidance of Erik Satie. In the January 16, 1920, edition of Comoedia , the music critic Henri Collet nicknamed this group “Les Six”—Georg- es Auric, Louis Durey, Artur Honegger, Dar- ius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre—in contrast to the Russian “Five.” Members of Les Six, writer/artist/director Jean Cocteau, and other artists dined together every Saturday, then spent the rest of the evening at Milhaud’s, at the Cirques Médrano (enjoying the clowning of the Fratellini brothers), or at Louis Moysés’s Le Gaya Bar (where Jean Wiéner played cabaret and jazz piano). In this artistically vibrant environment, Milhaud conceived Le boeuf sur le toit as a “fantasia” on Brazilian melodies stitched together by his own “rondo-like theme.” The title was a direct trans- lation of “ O Boi no Telhado ” (“The Ox on the Roof ”), a song written by José Monteiro (alias Zé Boiadêro) for the 1918 Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Although Milhaud never revealed the sources of his melodies, modern scholars have uncovered 28 tunes written by at least 14 Brazil- ian composers, the greatest number by Marce- lo Tupinambá (seven) and Ernesto Nazareth (four). Milhaud initially considered this score as accompaniment for a Charlie Chaplin film. Le boeuf sur le toit was given its premiere in Paris at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées on February 21, 1920. Cocteau devised the panto- mime scenario, Guy-Pierre Fauconnet designed Darius Milhaud (1920) RAVINIA.ORG  • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 63